This is a guest post by Victoria Greene, a freelance writer and branding expert.

In an ideal world, you will already be looking for ways to promote your book as you’re writing it. After all, you’ve already gone to the trouble of considering your audience and the style of writing they like, as well as analyzing the characteristics of your book’s chosen genre. But in terms of nitty-gritty marketing techniques, here are 7 author strategies you can learn from to promote your book successfully.

1. Make Your Website The Center Of Your Brand

Your website should be the central hub of your promotional operations. But for many authors, the thought of creating a fancy website can be daunting. By using a hosting platform like Squarespace, Shopify, or WordPress, authors can knock up a decent-looking website in a matter of hours – no previous experience in web design necessary. There are many basic templates for small brochure sites; you can also access hosting and all the tools needed to sell and promote your book online.

A basic author website should include:

● A homepage featuring your book’s cover image, synopsis, and link to buy or download● An About page including your background, an image, and contact details● A regularly updated blog● Links to your product listings on Amazon, Kobo, etc.● Book reviews● Links to your social media channels

2. Build Real Relationships

Writing is often tipped as a lonely profession. But in order to make it nowadays, no author is an island. The relationships you make both online and in person will make or break your career.

Finding influential voices in your genre or subject matter is easy thanks to social media, but being heard and remembered by these influencers is a different story.

Obviously, trying to get in touch with J.K. Rowling on Twitter isn’t going to be a successful strategy, but starting off locally might be. Find writing groups and authors in your area and make a connection. In building authentic relationships, you will need to take the time to build your own genuine interest in other people’s work. Attend writing events and offer to guest post on another author’s blog every once in a while.

3. Think In Keywords

As the biggest bookseller online, Amazon has refined its internal search engines to the nth degree. Its use of metadata and keywords helps millions of customers find the books they want to read in seconds.

Authors should, therefore, consider their book’s keywords very carefully, in order to draw the most traffic to their page. Remember, it is not just about ‘stating the obvious’ in terms of naming your genre or targeting highly competitive search terms.

To avoid common Amazon keyword mistakes, you should firstly think about your readers and the kind of words they might use to find your book. If non-fiction, might they be searching Amazon for a book that solves a problem? Similarly, if your work is fiction, does it cover any widely discussed or topical themes, such as environmentalism? For more on readers’ search intent on Amazon, take a look at this previous post.

4. Boost Your Email List

Your email marketing strategy could be paramount to your long-term success as an author. Developing a long list of subscribers isn’t easy, but these regular readers are crucial to building up your core fanbase.

Sites like Twitter and Facebook change their terms of use intermittently. This puts writers at the mercy of moderators. Should their sites ever fail, or your profile get removed, you will have no other way of reaching your subscribers from these sites. Adding a link to your mailing list on these profiles will help your core fans stay in touch and engaged with your brand.

Further, make sure you provide your email subscribers with remarkable and exclusive content from time-to-time. For example, a free supplementary eBook download could be a great way to build up anticipation ahead of a new book launch.

Email lists are also one of the cheapest forms of direct marketing available to authors. In order to build a list that drives significant sales traffic, you need to promote and talk about it often within your blog posts and social media updates.

5. Gather Reviews As Early As You Can

Ideally a good few months before your book is released, you will need to begin the process of gathering reviews. In order to do this, you will need to prepare some ‘Galley Proofs’ of the first couple of chapters in a PDF. Don’t be afraid to approach many different industry voices, publications, and even news publications to get a review. Even if the review is only couple of sentences, you can use this as part of your publicity material.

6. Don’t Ignore Facebook

You should already be using social media to connect with interested readers. Through online communication there is ample opportunity to promote your book, without relying on the typical front cover image and pitch.

Since everyone and their mother (often literally!) use social media these days, authors ignore sites like Facebook at their peril. There are numerous creative ways to bring up your book’s content, without expressly plugging it.

For instance, if there is a news story that closely mirrors some of the issues the characters in your book face, share this and ask your readers for comments. If your protagonist battles with depression, for example, the latest research findings could easily be related to your readers. Further, if you do this in the development stages of your book, your reader’s observations may help guide your character’s behavior and make them more believable.

Millions of authors use Facebook as a tool for promotion, but did you know that you can also use the social media site as a direct selling platform? Using Facebook’s marketplace, you can safely and securely sell copies of your book from your author profile page.

You will need to set up a separate Facebook page under your author name, rather than your personal profile. Depending on the ecommerce selling application you opt for, you can very quickly and easily make your own online store for your books, with very little technical know-how required. So why not make the most out of this traffic?

7. Generate Sales Fast With A Promotion

Amazon sales are based on rankings. Books at the top of the rankings are more likely to be discovered by potential readers. So it should be the aim of every author to rank as well as they can.

There is no surefire way to cheat Amazon’s algorithmic ranking system. However, generating many sales over a short time period is bound to contribute some positive traction for your book’s ranking within the site.

Offering a large discount over a 48-hour period is a great way to generate fast sales in the early instance of a book launch. Also, be sure to ask these discount readers for a review, so more readers can look you up online.

You should also blast the news of your sale on social media sites and use a book promotion hosting service, such as Bargain Booksy, to help you get the word out to as many people as possible.

Marketing should infuse everything you do as an author, from designing your front covers, to putting your best foot forward with your social media posts. There are many tricks of the trade that can help you boost your website and sales rankings. But ultimately, your success will come down to the amount of genuine effort you’re putting into promoting yourself and engaging with readers.

Victoria Greene is a freelance writer and branding expert. She runs her own blog at victoriaecommerce.com. Here she dispenses advice to authors and brands looking to boost their sales online.

Have you ever wondered if the genres authors most enjoy writing in, match the genres readers most enjoy reading? Before self-publishing, all new books for sale were filtered by agents and publishers, who acquired and worked on books they thought would sell well. If there was an oversupply of manuscripts by authors in a particular genre, the competition to be chosen and published within the genre, would be higher too. Enter self-publishing: now any writer can publish, without filter, into any genre they desire. Given the influx of new books across genres, does the proportion of books in each genre meet with readers' demand?

(We focussed on fiction for this experiment).

Methodology (or How to Speed Read 3000 books in 3 hours)

To answer our question, we needed a way to read and understand a good sized sample of self-published books, to determine their genre. You might ask why we couldn't simply use the categories or tags authors themselves apply to their books? The reason is accuracy and consistency - most indie authors don't have years of book categorization experience, working across a number of titles. Even traditionally published books are categorized inconsistently from book to book and from publisher to publisher. The inconsistency is not because publishers are poor at the job, but because standardizing the process would require centralizing the categorization effort. (We've worked with data feeds from all major publishers and have experienced this phenomenon first hand). The only way to derive accurate and consistent categorization is to read a large sample of books, understand how each book relates to each category, and assign it, while ensuring consistency across the sample. One of our systems does just this.

We gave our categorization system over 3000 self-published novels to read and understand (these were books offered free by the author). For each book, our system identified all the topics the novels were about, then used this topical knowledge to assign each book to one or more categories and genres. Overall, our system read over 260 million words and figured out all the genres, categories and topics in the data below, in a few hours.

What writers write

Writer’s Genres

The top genres (by count) detected by our system were Romance, Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Romance was the most popular genre, with 24.4% of books tagged. By combining Science Fiction and Fantasy though, to derive a total score of 32.1%, we can deduce that writers enjoy writing in this genre more than any other. Literary and Mystery & Detective both came in around 6%. How does this compare to what readers read?

Reader’s Genres

To understand the genres readers enjoy reading the most, we looked at revenue data. This doesn't incorporate units purchased or read, or ratings, but in aggregate, revenue is a good proxy indicator for reader enjoyment.

The highest selling fiction genres were Romance/Erotica, Crime/Mystery and Science Fiction and Fantasy. Romance was high in both charts, but we can broadly extrapolate that there’s a potentially underserved market for Crime and Mystery & Detective and an oversupply for Science Fiction and Fantasy books (when combining the two genres in our first chart).

The correlation isn’t perfect of course, as our sample size is small, we're not considering units sold vs. price, and the revenue data is based on the less consistent human classification of books. We also assume the novelists in our sample wrote their books for the joy of it, and didn’t select their categories purely for commercial potential. These points aside, for the purposes of this post, the proportional difference in genres across the two charts is interesting.

BISAC Categories

We also wanted to understand the categorical split of each genre, so we dove deeper and analyzed the individual BISAC categories that made up each genre. The chart below is measured by category composition - which analyzes how much of each book belongs to a category. For example, instead of tagging a book as Romance and Fantasy, our systems tell us the book is 30% Romance and 70% Fantasy.

This chart closely matches our genre chart, but tells us that Romance books typically consist of more granular categories than Science Fiction and Fantasy categories. This is somewhat reflected in the number of different BISAC subcategories for the genres - Romance has almost 50% more sub-categories than Science Fiction and Fantasy combined. It also alludes to a level of variance in the categories - our system was more easily able to split Romance titles into clearly distinct categories, but for Sci Fi and Fantasy, most content was generalized to Fantasy / General or Science Fiction / General.

(We've also classified tens of thousands of freely available Gutenberg books, which you can browse here. Many of these books were published before BISAC was invented.)

Topics

Next, we dove even deeper to look at the topic composition of our sample of books, and analyzed how much each book was made up of each topic. The topics listed below aren’t industry standard, and were created by our team. Topics allow us to quickly and programmatically understand, at a more granular level, what a book is about.

Given the strong bias for Science Fiction and Fantasy, the top few topics aren't particularly surprising. One observation we can make from this data, is that some genres have a higher proportion of genre-specific content than others. For example, a Romance novel will have many romantic scenes and dialogue, and be romance-themed. But the story will often revolve around another topic (western, military, etc.). A Science Fiction or Fantasy novel will usually contain a high proportion of genre-specific content - the whole world of the story will usually relate to the genre. Books in these genres are also likely to encompass elements of other genres too. Therein lies the categorization challenge we discussed earlier - should a novel be FIC027130 (Romance / Science Fiction) or FIC028000 (Science Fiction / General) or both? Are the romance elements strong enough for a book to be categorized as a 'Romance' book? Publishers of course, use knowledge of the book as well as strategic category selection, to influence placement of their books on bookstore bookshelves.

A few notes on the topics above. 'Existence' - covers concepts such as consciousness, the universe, humanity and realms - elements often found in Sci Fi / Fantasy. 'Vampires' have their own topic (instead of being part of 'Creatures & Monsters') which reflects the more prominent showing of vampires compared to other monsters, in recent fiction. 'Erotica' as a topic is smaller in representation for the reasons we discussed above for 'Romance'.

Conclusion

We speculate that writers write more Sci Fi and Fantasy books, as it's simply a lot of fun to create entire worlds with their own rules, creatures and customs. Mystery & Detective or Crime novels, while also fun to write, are often set in our reality, and typically require some technical or specialized knowledge - details which may need to be fact checked and accurate. Many authors in these genres have had prior experience in the field, or have spent significant effort researching their topics. These books will often teach the reader something, which is appealing to readers.

As a writer, should you switch to Crime and Mystery in order to increase your odds of landing an agent or selling more self-published books? We don't think so. Write in the genre that is the best fit for you, as doing so will be reflected in your published work.

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into what self-published authors are writing. Please let us know how you interpreted our results in the comments below.

When it comes to book discovery and retail search, traditional publishers have two advantages over indie publishers.

More Keywords

The first is the ability to add more keywords to a book. Most independent authors will be able to add 5-7 keywords to their book's metadata. Each keyword (or phrase) provides an opportunity for the book to be matched with more search queries. The more search queries a book matches, the more times it will show up in search results, which of course means an increase in the potential customers who will see the book.

How is this possible?

Each online retailer (such as Amazon), accepts book metadata through different channels, and processes it for the search engine to use. Most independent authors add their data through a website (such as http://kdp.amazon.com). These websites are coded with specific rules about what data can be added and restrict, for example, how many keywords can be entered. (This is necessary to ensure a minimum level of quality in the data, which can impact search results).

Enter ONIX

Publishers, on the other hand, typically send book metadata to retailers in bulk, using an industry file format called ONIX. Under the ONIX standard, the keyword field has no restriction on the number of keywords that can be added to a book.

Practically speaking, adding a very large number of keywords will lead to limited discovery benefit, as each online retailer will parse and process a maximum number of keywords.

But retailers almost certainly accept more than 7 keywords. The ONIX standard recommends filling the keyword field with 250 characters. The BISG working group, dedicated to book keyword best practices, however, recommends using 500 characters. This working group comprises members from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the consumers of this book metadata, who use it in their search engines (we covered this group in our last post). Given this recommendation, and the contributors behind it, it's unlikely the book retailers would restrict keywords to less than 500 characters.

So how does this compare to the 5-7 keywords self-published authors are allowed? 500 characters equates to approximately 80 words, which is at least 27 keywords (phrases of 3 words in length - or more if keywords of 2 words are included). This is almost 4 times as many keywords.

Isn't having too many keywords bad for SEO?

Retail search engines process keywords from metadata in a structured manner (as opposed to web search engines that extract keywords content like web pages), and are unlikely to be subject to keyword dilution, which is the idea that using more keywords reduces an individual keyword's value. Keyword dilution can be a problem for a web page, as the breadth of topics a web page covers is likely to be less than an entire book.

It makes sense to use many keywords to describe the many topics in a book.

Does all this equate to a discovery advantage?

It is highly likely. If you use one keyword, your book will be matched to related search queries about that one topic. If you use 20 or more keywords, your book has 20 opportunities to be matched against different types of search queries, therefore significantly increasing the number of customers likely to see the associated book.

Better Search Data

The second advantage for publishers, who publish on Amazon, is data to help with Amazon SEO. Publishers with a high enough sales volume, will be invited to apply for access to ARA (Amazon Retail Analytics) which provides insight into search queries used by customers on Amazon. Core to any effective SEO strategy is the ability to evaluate and assess different keywords (search terms) for search volume (this is what Google Analytics provides free). ARA provides this data, albeit in a slightly obfuscated value called 'Search Frequency', along with data about conversions. Access to this data improves the efficiency and accuracy of keyword selection, as it allows publishers to determine whether to apply a long or short tail keyword to a book (depending on it's sales rank), and also to assess the type of books that convert the best for each search term.

We can speculate why these differences exist, which are likely rooted in the history of traditional publishing and of self-publishing. In the early days of self-publishing, independent authors were much less sophisticated than they are today, as were the service providers to help them publish. It's likely disparities such as these, that provide considerable advantage to traditional publishers, will become less pronounced as the self-publishing industry matures.

Crafting effective keywords to add to a book's metadata, could be one of the highest return marketing activities to increase online sales potential. This post examines why keywords are so important, and how they affect discovery on Amazon.

Search is the primary way that customers use to locate products on Amazon. Customers search by entering keywords, which are matched against the search terms you enter for a product. Well-chosen search terms increase a product's visibility and sales. The number of views for a product detail page can increase significantly by adding just one additional search term—if it's a relevant and compelling term.

We differentiate between keywords derived from web page text (Google, Bing, etc.) and keywords added to a book's metadata for consumption by a book retailer (Amazon, Barnes & Noble). Web search engines crawl web pages to derive keywords and concepts, to help users find information. Book product search engines consume book metadata (which includes keywords), provided by the publisher or author, and help customers find books to purchase.

People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon.

Why can't the machines just figure it all out?

So why the difference between a web and a book (product) search engine? Why can't Amazon read a book's text to figure out what to index, just like Google crawls a web page? There are two core reasons for this:

1. Human classification beats machine classification, when done properly. People are better at describing books, in terms other people relate to, than machines. The technology exists to understand the topical content of a book (we know, we've built it), but for a product search engine, it's more effective for Amazon to put the burden of describing a book in keywords, onto the author or publisher. The author/publisher, in turn, has a strong incentive to increase their book's discoverability in search.

2. It's easier for Amazon to do. Pretend you're a technical superstar tasked with building a search engine for millions of books. What solution do you think would be easier to build? One where you had to index 5-20 human curated keywords that describe each book, or one where you had to index tens (or hundreds) of thousands of words per book to find out what it's about? Leveraging an incentivised crowd to manually add descriptive terms in a structured format, is a much smarter and technically simpler solution.

Isn't it a search engine, not a discovery engine?

It has been said that search is not discovery, but this perspective doesn't consider the complex task search engine's undertake to discern user intent (we've talked about the different user intents when searching before). Let's look at the distinction between book discovery and book search (within the context of a search engine), and how different elements of metadata support different user intents:

Book Search

Searching for a specific book or title supports a customer who has 'discovered' a book through another channel, and is simply visiting a book retailer to purchase the book. In this case, the user intent is obvious, and the implementation is a basic, nuts and bolts 'search' engine. As a publisher or author, you really don't have much to do to optimize for this use case. Your book title and author (contributor) name is specified in the metadata. The engine performs a simple match for these fields to a customer's search query. This is why there is no need to include book title and author name in your keywords.

Book Discovery

Book discovery, in the context of a 'search' engine supports many cases of different user intent, where a customer isn't searching for a specific book. The engine helps the customer discover books that satisfy their query. For example, customers might use a book search engine to discover:• a new book to read in their favorite genre ('contemporary romance new releases')• a book to learn about a trending topic ('books about the islamic state')• a book to solve a problem ('back pain')

The metadata that directly influences book discovery on Amazon search are keywords.

Cases exist where subtitles and category names impact discovery, but keywords are designed for, and have a direct relation to book discovery. Other discovery mechanisms also exist, of course, such as bestseller lists and item-to-item similarity recommendations, but these are often outside of the control of an author/publisher.

There is a clear link between how customers mentally label and group books, and how they express their intent when trying to find books. Amazon attempts to replicate this organization via it's search engine and associated categorical data. By using the language and terms customers actively use to search for books, it can more accurately answer book queries at scale.

The bulk of the complexity of a successful book search engine, lies not in basic title/author matching, but in deciphering a user's intent when broad terms are used for discovery. Helping a customer find and purchase a book when they're unsure of exactly what they're looking for, is big business.

Do readers even discover new books through search?

Unless you have access to internal search query and purchase data from a major online retailer, it's not possible to make an absolute assertion one way or the other. So let's consider some visible signals:

The industry believes so

The BISG has created a working group dedicated purely to defining best practices for keywords in book metadata. These keywords (in almost all cases) are curated by a person, to be stored with the rest of the book's metadata, and used by retailers (such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble) to help consumers find books. These are not the keywords that web search engines, such as Google, extract from the content of book descriptions on product pages.

The group comprises members from all the publishing service provider heavyweights (Ingram, Bowker, etc.), all big five publishers (plus many others), Library of Congress, Barnes & Noble and also Amazon.

Most large publishers have also allocated in-house resources (of varying expertise) specifically to curating keywords for their books.

Amazon has invested heavily in Search and Sales Business Intelligence

Access to this data is only available to a small number of organizations that sell a lot online, through a product called Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA). It's goal is to help vendors optimize their product listings to sell more, largely through data optimization for search. Here's a screenshot.

ARA provides publishers with data on how often keywords are searched for (volume), click through rates and conversion rates. It has it's limits, but is far more information than most smaller publishers and independent authors have access to.

When considering the investment and focus the publishing industry has dedicated to keywords, which are created for the sole purpose of helping consumers find books - it's challenging to dismiss the vital role they perform in selling books online.

A sales panacea?

Will the perfect keywords alone magically whisk a book to the bestsellers list? No. The fundamentals need to be executed well, which results in a quality, professional product with market demand. Quality can't be faked over the long term, and short term hacks won't lead to sustainable ongoing sales.

Effective keywords increase a book's chance of being located by the right customer, and help augment success achieved through other marketing channels. While keywords can increase a book's exposure, whether a customer discovers a quality book or not, will ultimately be represented by unit sales and reviews.

Conclusion

We've analyzed how keywords work and why they're important - which is to help sell more books in the marketplace where most books are sold. The industry acknowledges the importance of this correlation, as evidenced by its focus and investment in keyword standardization and dedication of resources (at publisher and retailer level). Yet most authors and publishers don't create effective keywords for their books or update them very often. Compared to the effort and resources involved in publishing a title, a well-implemented keyword strategy can be one of the highest ROI marketing activities for a book. In many cases, this represents a strong, currently missed, opportunity for increased book discovery.

Amazon continually updates it's browse node categories for books, to cater to the shifting needs of the market. In the last six months, 563 new categories were added, and 122 were removed. There were also a number of category name refinements. Categories serve the purpose of helping readers find similar books. As the number of books allocated to a category fluctuates, the granularity of the categories needs to change too. If categories remained static, they'd become unbalanced, with too few or too many books, which would make browsing and searching for books a challenge.

We've summarized the changes to book categories (browse nodes), that have occurred over the past six months, looking at the impact on various top level categories.

Genres with new categories added

There were 345 new 'Teen & Young Adult' categories added in the past six months, which is likely a reflection of the huge increase in YA sales over the past year.

Only one 'New Adult' category was added (Science Fiction & Fantasy/Fantasy/New Adult & College), to take the total to two categories (the other is: Romance/New Adult & College). Rather than expand this newer category, the breadth of 'Teen & Young Adult' has been expanded to accommodate the influx of titles in this area.

Genres with categories removed

The 'Computers & Technology' genre had the most categories removed (88), but had an almost equal number of categories added (87). Technology experiences rapid changes, so a commensurate shift in categorization of the subject matter is likely to occur.

The second largest genre with categories removed was 'Crafts, Hobbies & Home', and within that genre, almost half were in the 'Home Improvement & Design' sub-category.

Conclusion

Changes in browse node categories reflect shifts in the type of books available for sale. An increase in categories for a genre is likely driven by a combination of additional supply of books in the genre, and of increased effort to improve the searchability of those books. One may speculate how these two factors reflect increased demand for books in a genre.

Coming up with relevant and effective keywords is hard! Keeping them up-to-date and optimized for then number of sales your book is currently making is even harder. Here are common mistakes we see authors make when implementing their keyword strategy on Amazon:

A human copyeditor is unlikely to be completely displaced by a machine, but a significant portion of common copy edit’s to manuscripts could be automated. A primitive tool to assist with copyediting exists (AutoCrit) which suggests changes to text based on readability and other metrics. An advanced tool could be created to capture micro edits across multiple manuscripts, compare these edits and then automatically apply the changes where confidence in the change is high.

Publishing houses are best placed to create these specialized copyediting knowledge bases. They could start by installing software on editors' machines to capture each line-edit and log it to a central database. A copyediting rules engine would then analyze the before and after text changes using part-of-speech (POS) tagging to disambiguate word-categories. After collecting enough examples of similar edits, a rule could be learned by the system, and applied to similar occurrences in new text. These rules would be saved as templates that understand POS tagging. A rules-based library already exists that could easily be adapted to support this system.

The new copyedit system will undoubtedly suggest suboptimal changes, or multiple text alternatives. In this scenario, a human would verify the change. The system would learn which changes were preferable, under which circumstances, until it has enough knowledge and confidence to apply edits automatically. The review process could be extended to include feedback from book reviewers, to rate the most effective changes.

It's unlikely the system could turn good writing into great writing, but at the very least, it could learn enough Strunk-like style suggestions to improve poor writing, via rule based templates, for example to ‘use the active voice', 'omit needless words' and to 'put statements in positive form'.

Kadaxis is pleased to announce the beta release of Slush Filter, a tool for literary agents and publishers. Slush Filter accepts fiction manuscripts of 40,000 words or more, in doc, docx, txt and ePub formats, and provides a machine generated report in seconds. Each report contains:

A recommendation on whether to review the manuscript (based on potential marketability)

If you were a fan of 50 Shades of Grey, you might be interested in these somewhat older, classic tales that our algorithms classified as Fiction / Erotica, purely by analyzing the content. All titles from Project Gutenberg are available as a free download to your eReader or to browse online. Check them out: